FIG. 1 depicts a side view of portion of a conventional heat assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) disk drive 10. For clarity, FIG. 1 is not to scale. For simplicity not all portions of the HAMR disk drive 10 are shown. The HAMR disk drive 10 includes a HAMR head 11 including a slider 12 and a transducer 20. THE HAMR disk drive 10 also includes a laser/light source 14, media 18 and preamplifier and associated circuitry 30. The laser 14 is typically a laser diode. Although shown as mounted on the slider 11, the laser 14 may be coupled with the slider 11 in another fashion. For example, the laser 11 might be mounted on a suspension (not shown in FIG. 1) to which the slider 11 is also attached. The media 18 may include multiple layers, which are not shown in FIG. 1 for simplicity.
The HAMR head 11 includes a HAMR transducer 20. The HAMR head 11 may also include a read transducer (not shown in FIG. 1). The read transducer may be included if the HAMR head 11 is a merged head. The HAMR transducer 20 includes optical components (not shown in FIG. 1) as well as magnetic components (not shown in FIG. 1).